Wireless sensors extend internet's reach

Read more about how sensor networks link students, researchers with real-world data http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=7233

Your Phone as a Virtual Tour Guide

More and more mobile phones and PDAs have built-in sensors that can detect position, light, and motion. New software lets people build their own GPS-enabled games and tours for portable devices. Read more at in MIT's Technology Review

The iPhone

The new iPhone announced this week will use sensors to track light and movement and proximity, to prompt the phone to control screen brightness adn physical orientation and other aspects of its operation. For example, when the phone is placed next to the user's face, the keyboard is automatically turned off.

Sensors as Art

I visited an exhibit by Shih Chieh Huang at the Des Moines Art Center. Mr. Huang creates kinetic sculptures using toys, computer parts, and sensors to create interactive exhibits. One of his pieces entitled Pulse, was part of the exhibit.

Neural Engineering

Our brain has a trillion neurons connected by 10 quadrillion synapses. One of the challenges in sensory interface design is to build an artificial neural networks that are comparable in size weight and power consumption to our biological ones.

Neuromorphic Microchips (also called low powered digital chips) are compact, efficient electronics whose design is based on the brain's neural system.

Scientists have been working on microchips to create an artificial retina made in silicone to help blind people see. One of the pioneers in this technology was Kareem Zaghloul .When he was a doctoral student in 2001 he created a chip for this purpose that worked at 60 miliwatts, which is one thousandth of the electricity that a PC needs to operate. “Chip fabricators today can cram a million transistors and 10 meters of wire onto a square millimeter of silicon. By the end of this decade, chip density will be just a factor of 10 show of cortex tissue density’ the cortex has 100 million synapse and three kilometers of axon per cubic millimeter.”

Another doctoral student/scientist by the name of Paul A. Merolla has been using using voltage sensitive dye, while simultaneously recording spikes from a neuron within the patch of imaged cortex to help them build computer chips that can do the same thing.

Wyatt, an engineer from MIT, and his colleague Joseph Rizzo are working on creating a Visual prosthetic or an implant that electrically stimulate the retina. This technology is not yet available to the public yet, but the way scientists envision it working is the patient will wear glasses with a miniature camera on it. The “glasses will sport a small laser that receives the camera’s pictures and converts the visual information into electrical signals that travel to the implant, surgically inserted just below the retina.” Scientific American Special Edition: Secrets of the Senses pg. 66. Click here to see a drawing of the camera and implant .One of the biggest challenges the scientists are facing is how to make this implant waterproof. To see a silicon retina’s response to a face click here .

Blog Name Change

As my explorations continue I realize that I need to change the name of my blog. Initially I named my blog Social Interface Design because the technology I was interested in was named Social Interface. This technology took sound waves and helped people use it to obtain social information about groups. However, the other technologies I've been studying are less about collecting social information as they are about technologies that collect sensory information. So I am changing my blog name from Social Interface Design to Sensory Interface Design.

Eyetracking

New technologies exist that track people’s eye movements as they look at web pages. The technology creates heatmaps that show where the eye is drawn on a web page.

This technology has also been helpful in understanding how people read.

A joint eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it and eye tracking firm Eyetools has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a "golden triangle" ( See Report ).

Read how to understand an individual eye tracking session and see an online video of Eyetracking Research.

I also found an interesting blog on Eyetools Research.

There is a new company in the UK called clickdensity that will create heatmaps tracking mouseclicks. You can try a demo or sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Site Visit to ICT

As part of our last face to face session we visited the Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT) http://www.ict.usc.edu/ . ICT creates simulations that are used for learning.

"Humans remember more if they have an emotional response" (http://www.ict.usc.edu/content/view/62/118 ) . They have a way of monitoring participant's emotional responses to the simulations through monitoring physiological responses. The evaluation system they have developed is called SEE (Sensory Environments Evaluation). "Analysis of data to date has shown that high arousal states in the virtual environment equate to increased retention, and that participants with high first person shooter (FPS) game skills may need enhanced stimulation to achieve the same amount of arousal/retention as non-FPS game players" (http://www.ict.usc.edu/content/view/62/118 ) . Some of the ways they measure this is through participant's heart rate and skin conductance response (SCR). See an example of SCR report at http://projects.ict.usc.edu/see/ under the Bio Feedback link.

When we visited the simulation lab, there were devices that had the ability to track eye movements and cameras that recorded head movements as we were watching the simulation.

What type of design am I interested in?

This was the question that was posed to us in our Human Computer Interaction Course taught by Dr. Paul Sparks at Pepperdine University.

We were asked to explore the following web site hosted by Stanford University that had a video achieve of lectures related to HCI and find out what topics interested us http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/students/cs547archive.htm .

So far I have visted three lectures:

(1) Social Interface November 4th 2005 by Professor Alex Pentland, MIT Media Lab

This lecture was on work MIT is doing on developing devices that can collect social information.

My company does a lot of group facilitation between different stakeholders in school districts to do strategic planning in the area of technology. I am interested in whether these new technologies could help us better facilitate these types of groups and if it could be useful in helping districts make better decisions about technology.

(2) Smart Mobs: Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing and Collective Action September 26th 2003 by Howard Rheingold

This lecture had to do with how human interactions are changing because of wireless devices such as cell phones. It talked about how people are using these technologies to create collaborative communities. It also talked about the emergence of reputation systems as a result of using some of these technologies. This would be things such as how you can rate experiences with sellers on e-bay. These new technologies bring a whole new set of issues concerning digital rights management and copyright. Rheingold feels that the decisions we make about these technologies will determine the future of democracy in a real way.

(3) Hanging Out With Computers: The Role of IM in Teenage Communication March 8, 2002 by Rebecca Grinter, PARC

This lecture was about what teenagers are doing with instant messaging (IM) and why and what can we learn from teenagers and how they use communication technologies. Some of the findings were that IM allows users to multi-task, it is quiet and allows for economic optimization of free resources (often without invoking the anger of parents).


All three of my choices had to do with the social aspects of computing. I am interested in new emerging technologies that are shaping our culture and how these technologies could be used in the field of education.

Wikopedia defines social interaction design as “the behaviors or interactions of an object or system over time with its user population. Interaction designers create products and services that are typically informed by user research, designed with an emphasis on behavior as well as form, and evaluated in terms that include emotional factors instead of mere usability.
Social interaction design (SxD) is emerging due to many of our computing devices have become networked and have begun to integrate communication capabilities. Phones, digital assistants and the myriad of connected devices from computers to games facilitate talk and social interaction. Social interaction design account for interactions among users as well as between users and their devices. The dynamics of interpersonal communication, speech and writing, the pragmatics of talk and interaction--these now become critical factors in the use of social technologies. And they are factors described less by an approach steeped in the rational choice approach taken by cognitive science than by sociology, psychology, and anthropology.

Virtual world is an example of system which is heavily rely on social interaction design. Social interaction in the community, gathering and teamwork are also some examples of activities can be designed by social interaction design.”